This invention relates to a coke oven.
More particularly, the invention relates to novel coke oven wall structures and methods for making coke oven walls.
Coke ovens traditionally comprise massive refractory brick structures in which there are batteries of adjacent parallel walls made up from a large variety of differently shaped refractory bricks. The bricks must be able to withstand high temperatures and strong mechanical loading. At the same time, the interior of the walls contains flue ducts, burners, flue gas control passages and the like. The detailed design of the oven is usually quite complicated in order to obtain the necessary heat distribution within the oven and gas flows through the walls.
It follows from the above that coke ovens are relatively costly structures and any downtime for servicing and repairs can represent a significant economic loss for an operator.
Further, the production of ceramic bricks from which the walls are made is relatively costly and there is accordingly a need to generally reduce the number of different types of bricks which are used in a wall. It is undesirable, however, to have a design concept which utilises relatively large ceramic bricks in the construction. Excessively large bricks cannot be handled without the use of mechanical lifting devices. Further, bricks having a dimension greater than 650 mm machined pressed to form a fused silica product are generally unavailable. Bricks greater than this size can be hand cast but these are much more expensive. Large bricks can be machine pressed from conventional silica, but conventional silica bricks would have a very serious disadvantage in that a wall made therefrom would need a heat up time which is many times greater than that for fused silica bricks.
The object of the invention is to provide a new coke oven wall construction which overcomes a number of disadvantages of the prior art.